Cover | Tony Speirs and Art Farm

Portrait of a Girl (2006, acrylic, pencil and mixed media on panel, detail). Portrait of a Girl is a small portion of a room-sized installation (8 feet by 39 feet) called The Game of Hope or Fear, created for the 2006 Burning Man festival by Tony Speirs and Art Farm, a large and loose art collective. The Burning Man theme that year was “The Future: Hope or Fear?” To convey the theme, Speirs designed a 16-foot-long, playable game board, flanked by portraits of a girl and a boy who represent the future. Art Farm artists (more than 60 participants including the East Bay’s Garo Amaro, Claire Cotts, Erik Friedman and Mike Terry) contributed the thousands of drawings that became the paintings’ background. The resulting three-panel piece was hung in a room just below the Burning Man sculpture at the 2006 festival. Speirs has lived, worked, and exhibited in Oakland, Alameda, Emeryville, Berkeley and Crockett. He and his wife now live in Sonoma County. To see more of Speirs’ work, go to www.tonyspaintings.blogspot.com. For more information about Art Farm, go to www.artfarmmotel.blogspot.com.